Friday, January 23, 2009

Just Fix It ... (like Obama)

It's remarkable that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the President of the United States - two highly intelligent and skilled men - could screw up something as easy as just reading and repeating the exact words in the Oath of Office. But they did. And this gives me hope too, and I believe gives good insight and example for us all.

Thoughts:

1. Even the smartest people can make very easy mistakes with very public display of that mistake. Unfortunately, association executives can make very easy mistakes that are very public too. And there actually isn't much that anyone can do to prevent it - it just happens. To everyone.

2. If there's a potential to ensure that the fix is really the fix - then fix it. I loved that the outcome was to repeat the Oath of Office in a private ceremony just to be sure that there was positively no question that the verbatim oath actually did happen. There are multitudes of examples in our careers were we face the "well this is probably okay" evaluation of a decision or a situation - if there's any way to turn a probably into a definitely then it's worth the extra call, the extra checking, the extra fixing, the do-over to be SURE that it's right (or fixed).

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